Interoperability with Standardless IoT

The Internet of Things is overrun with a plethora of standards: AllJoyn, HomeKit, Thread Group, Open Interconnect Consortium, and many many more.

What these standards have in common is their prescriptive nature: “here’s how you do this”. This is a great model if we all agree on the standard - think HTML! - but an unholy mess if we don’t.

But what if we took the opposite approach, simple describing the capability of things and using that as a jumping off point? Is it possible to create interoperability through descriptive standards? The answer - emphatically - is yes.

This talk will be about how standard web technologies - JSON, JSON-LD, Javascript, Node.JS and RESTful models - can be easily be used to “control all the things”.

We’ve worked with off the shelf components such as WeMo, Hue, SmartThings, TCP Lighting, LIFX; toys like littleBits; prototyping tools like Arduino and Raspberry Pis; protocols like UPnP, mDNS, Bluetooth Low Energy; and even “non-IoT” devices like receivers and television sets.

All code referenced in this talk is open source on GitHub (Apache license).